Uncomplaining, and alone, and silent
by never-give-up-hope2
Summary: "True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing." Ziva David. 31 years old. A story in a nutshell.


_So I know it has been a while. And I know I have 'All Alone' on the go. But I wanted to post something and this seemed better than nothing. I kind of like it. I hope you enjoy!_

* * *

" _Oh, sure about that, are you? Look at it this way. You've got your mother to look after you. And Mary Poppins and Constable Jones and me. Who looks after your father? Tell me that. When something terrible happens, what does he do? Fends for himself, he does. Who does he tell about it? No one! Don't blab his troubles at home. He just pushes on at his job, uncomplaining and alone and silent."_

 _~Bert,_ Mary Poppins (1964 film)

As a small child, she was never one to keep her troubles to herself.

She wasn't shy, or self-conscious (this was before her father had started training) and so did not hesitate to tell her parents if she was feeling poorly or hurt or happy. She didn't keep things to herself and would stand in the street when her mother took her to the market and cry to everyone who would listen, "I am _happy_ today!"

Rivka David always smiled and shook her head, although not attempting to hide how proud she was of her daughter, of how proud she was of the naïveté and innocence she displayed. Strangers who walked the path frequently always smiled and turned to their companions, smiled and said, "Look, there goes that little girl again. Isn't she adorable?" Seeing her for the first time, strangers would smile at the girl and then give Rivka a smile that said _your daughter is so sweet. You are very lucky to have her._ Rivka's answering nod of the head always meant _I know._

But then Tali was born and she got older and the disapproving _Zivaleh 's_ that rolled off her mother's tongue seemed to get more and more frequent. Her father was home less and less and her mother was arguing with him more and more and her and Tali and sometimes Ari were going to say with their Aunt Chana (their mother's sister who lived in a big house by the sea) more often and when they came back their parents were talking with each other less often and everything became so confusing and so _difficult_ that it became hard to function at anything resembling a normal capacity. Her schoolwork suffered, as did her health and at Passover her grandmother clucked her tongue and pinched her arm and said, "Ziv'keh, you are getting so _skinny._ Get changed into your _fig'ma'ot_ and have a nap before dinner please."

It was around then her father started her 'training' and suddenly twenty push-ups before being allowed to leave for school and ten lengths of swimming after school were the norm. It made her sleep at night and she built up muscle and became fit and healthy and _strong_ and with all these positives, she couldn't understand why her mother would _scream_ at her father on a weekly basis: "Eli, she is _nine .Nine. Why_ can you not understand that?" It was late at night and she was always tired from training and she could never make herself stay up long enough to hear her father's reply.

Then one night, suddenly, she was awoken from her sleep by her mother who was shaking her while whispering _shhh_ and telling her to pack a bag with only the things she absolutely couldn't live without. Books, her bear and the scarf Ari brought her back from a school trip to Paris went into the backpack that she took to school and before she knew it she was in the back of her mother's car – leaving the apartment building she knew as home behind.

Then came months of living in Haifa in a small apartment with one bedroom that they all had to share and while she felt safer being all squished up with her siblings, something about it made her feel so _claustrophobic_ and so _squished_ that she felt like she would never be able to be on her own again. She missed her father, she missed _home_ with her bed and the swimming pool that she did cannonballs in with Ayla and she missed school with her teachers and her friends and the uniform that made her father give her the funny sort of smile. Her health started to suffer again and all of the muscle she had built up was lost and when her Aunt Nettie came to visit she clucked her tongue and said, "Ziva, are you alright, my dear?" But she _wasn't_ alright and she couldn't tell and it made her feel so sad inside.

It was only a matter of time before she had to go home and really, she knew it had been coming all along. Her mother had been having angry, whispered conversations on the phone when the children were meant to be sleeping and she had been silently packing up things for days. Ari and Rivka returned with heavy hearts and faces whereas Ziva and Tali were ecstatic. They had missed their father so much and their room that they shared and they had missed school and just _everything_ about Tel-Aviv.

Except with coming home there came the not-so-perfect life she had left behind and her parents were arguing more than ever and she just wanted it to _stop_ , for them to _stop_ and for this strange person called Orli to just _go away_ because she seemed to be complicating everything. Ziva started staying late after school, going to extracurricular activities, the gym, extra study time, _anything_ to keep her away from the arguing that her parents insisted on doing every – single – night.

It was then that she started keeping things to herself.

No longer did anybody hear about her feelings or what she was doing and no longer did anybody seem to _care._ Ari was away doing goodness knows what in Edinburgh, her parents were too busy with their divorce, arguing at every available silence and Tali was living in her own innocent bubble – being a social butterfly and caring about others. And Ziva? Ziva was studying at every available moment, because it was the only time she could get her parents to stay silent long enough and as a result, she aced her exams and tried not to be too disappointed when her parents were too busy arguing to listen.

Then her grandmother – her only surviving grandparent – died at the age of ninety-seven and all of a sudden there was nobody to call her _Ziv'keh_ and nobody to cluck over her skinny wrist and it gave her such a _tight_ feeling in her chest that choked her and made her feel as though she couldn't breathe. There was nobody to visit at Passover anymore, no reason to visit the small, rural kibbutzim settlement near the mountains where her mother had grown up and there was no reason for her parents to stop arguing for two weeks in December, March, July and October because there was nobody coming to visit anymore.

She threw herself into training because it was a way to fill that gap that her grandmother's death had left. The shooting range became her favourite place and the rifle became her favourite weapon and she _finally_ made her father proud but it was short-lived because all it did was create more things for her parents to argue about and one night she just _snapped_ and _shouted_ at them to just _stop_ but then it was all too much and she ran away crying even though it was something she had vowed never to do. She had sat outside for hours - too ashamed to go back and face her parents- and waited for her parents to come and find her. In the end it wasn't them who did. It was Tali, who hugged her and told her that it was dinner time and Ima was making Malabi for desert and she better come in now because it looked like it was going to rain and then she would get a cold.

Then everything was alright for a while. The arguing ceased and they had some good times as a family. Rivka allowed Eli to move back into the apartment and Ziva and Tali could even bring friends home without having to worry about their parents arguing and embarrassing them. They went to the beach, shopping, out for dinner and life was almost, _almost_ perfect.

Except life didn't stay perfect.

Rivka was killed while visiting a friend in Jerusalem when Ziva was fifteen years old and all of a sudden her father was crying in the middle of the night when he thought nobody could hear (because he had – really - always loved Rivka) and Tali was becoming increasingly paranoid and Ziva was keeping more, and more to herself because she knew that nobody could deal with her problems right now and it made her seem more selfless than she actually was but she didn't actually care because there were a lot worse things to seem. She threw herself into training again, just as she had years ago, because it filled the _emptiness_ and got rid of the _hurt_ and the _pain_ she felt inside.

She graduated high school and that same day she was given an IDF uniform, a locker, and a bed at the barracks where she stayed for all of two weeks. Two weeks later she was waving goodbye to Tali and her Aunt Chana (who now stayed at her apartment most of the time) and went on her way to fight all of the terrorists and radicals that her father had told her about as a child instead of dragons and monsters. She became the best in her squadron because of the ability she possessed to not let herself _feel_ or show _any_ emotion or soul. Secretly, inside, she was _glad_ because it was _so much easier_ to not feel and to just let go of _everything._

And _just_ as everything was starting to look up, the final blow came in the form of a phone call from her father while she was enjoying a day with friends in Haifa telling her that she might want to come home now. The bus stopped at a roadblock outside Tel-Aviv and looking out of the window, all she could see were a few broken buildings and equally as broken people searching for survivors. And somehow she _knew,_ she just _knew_ and she ran off the bus when it was still in the middle of the road. Conversations with her sister from the previous day flitted through her head: _Ziva! I feel really bad about going to town when you're just home but I haven't seen Natalie in ages and I thought it was okay since you're going to Haifa anyway. Anyway, we're going to a café that has just opened. Keller's, I think. It does not matter. We will be home by three so do not worry._ She saw the sign that was just hanging off the wall of the ruined building and she vomited into the dust. Everything that happened after that, she didn't remember. All that was clear was lying on the sofa, her head in her father's lap and her eyes red and sore from crying and her father stroking her hair and saying, "It's alright, Ziva. You're done. You're done." And in that moment, she truly thought she had never heard sweeter words from her father.

But such things were not destined to be and, although she would say otherwise later, she found herself almost begging for her predetermined place in Mossad. Here, she could go after _specific_ targets, instead of the ones that shot first. She could go after specific people and stop suicide bombers, just like the one that had cut her sister's life terribly short. And she _loved_ it. The other officers had it wrong; it had never been about proving to others that she belonged here because she was good, not just because of her father. It had never been about family pressure although it would be a lie to say that it hadn't been a factor that had turned her eyes in the direction of Mossad. No, it had always been about _revenge,_ about _prevention,_ about filling that hole that just seemed to get bigger and bigger and never ending.

Then it was missions with a red-haired, slightly nosey agent called Jenny in Cairo, with Officer Bashan (who was too close to her father for her to fully trust him) in Iraq, with Jenny again in Eastern Europe, in Paris with Namir Eschel and in the UK all by herself. She had a small apartment in Tel-Aviv but the only furniture was a bed, a second-hand chair and a refrigerator that was always empty. The only boxes were some clothes, some books and some things that she absolutely couldn't have left in her father's house. She was never there long enough, maybe a night or two but then there was always another mission and another terrorist that needed stopping and another person that needed Ziva David to save the world.

And it wasn't a great life, but it wasn't _bad_ either. Sure, there was no permanence, nothing set in stone but she rather liked it that way. It meant she had a sort of freedom that she'd never had before. She wasn't tied down to anything or anyone and it was better that way – she wasn't born to be anyone's wife or mother.

Then she got a call from her father telling her that she must go to Washington D.C to clean up a mess that Ari had decided to make. She was his control officer, after all, but as she sat on the plane, she had realised that Ari was beyond anyone's control. Especially his little half-sister. His biological mother had been killed in a retaliatory air strike by Israel and ever since then it had been like something had snapped in him. No longer did he seem to care about bringing down terrorists, rather he seemed eager to join them. Every week she would see him in their father's office, asking for a deeper cover assignment in Hamas. It unsettled her and perhaps that was why, not long after, her father had called for her and had said that she was being given a promotion to Ari's control officer. If she was honest, the thought of controlling her older brother had never settled with her well.

In America she met a grieving team and, even though she felt horrible for it, she began to wonder if Ari had lied to her, if he had really killed that innocent woman. The plan was simple, get the passports, get them to Ari and meet him in Paris. Then Agent Gibbs came to talk to her and she couldn't _not_ talk to him after what she had read in his file, because she knew the pain of losing people whom you love. _Then_ her father gave her the order: " _Ziva, Ari is out of control! Do something, anything. Use extreme force if necessary. He must_ _not_ _be allowed to destroy the relationships it has taken us years to build. You are his control officer, Ziva._ _Control_ _him!"_

And so she tried, she really did. She asked Ari to leave America sooner, she tried to trace his calls, persuade him to stop this and in the end she resorted to practically begging him, first as an officer and then as a little sister. Nothing worked and he eventually ignored her calls and she just felt so _helpless._ Her father tried to assign somebody else and she knew that person would just kill him, so she stopped feeling so sorry for herself and she set about extracting Ari as if he were just another deep-cover operative and not her much-loved (by her, of course) older brother. And then Agent Gibbs decided to destroy her newfound rigour by saying that he had a plan to help catch Ari but it involved her helping _him_ instead of her older brother and she would never, ever do that so she agreed even though it meant double crossing someone who she had recently met but had already started to trust. Stupid, stupid girl.

And then her brother was telling Gibbs the sins he had committed in a dark basement and suddenly she knew that she had to follow her father's orders, even though she had never intended to follow them at all. Before she knew it she was pulling a trigger and watching her brother, her big, strong, older brother, crumple to the ground as the bullet took away the last person that _truly_ mattered to her. And when she sang prayers to him, she suddenly wished she could turn back time, that she could escape with Ari to Paris and chase away the demons in his eyes and the ghosts that followed them everywhere. She suddenly wished for a do-over, even though she knew there were no such things.

Then there was a poorly-attended funeral, which her father said was what happened when you died as a traitor. A mission in the Swat region of Pakistan. A few family dinners with her Aunt Chana, who burst into tears when she told her the abridged version of Ari's death and she had to console her, knowing that _she_ was the reason for the tears her aunt was shedding into her shoulder. And somewhere, in the midst of all that, her father said casually that there was a job open at NCIS for a member on the MCRT and she took the chance to escape and called her old friend who was now _Director Jennifer Shepherd_ and asked if that job could be open to liaison officers. And when she got the call asking _how soon can you make arrangements for lodgings in D.C?_ she swore it was the happiest she had been in a long time.

For eight long years (excluding four months in the Horn of Africa and Israel) she laughed, cried and worked alongside the people who made up the closest thing she had ever had to a proper family. She managed to change who she was; turn herself from an assassin into an investigator. She began to trust people in a way she had never had reason to before. She learned how to use her training for good purposes, that victim's families thanking her for her time was worth the long hours and she learned that the end didn't _always_ justify the means. And she _loved_ it because she felt _different_ somehow and that was _good._

But then her father was killed by someone whom she considered a brother and she felt the bitter sting of a betrayal she hadn't felt in a _long_ time. She hadn't spoken to her father face-to-face in two years but he had still been _alive_ and there had still been _time_ to make amends. Now… now that was all gone and there was no time and no amendments made. He had died thinking his daughter hated him and while she had never concerned herself with his feelings, the thought of him dying thinking what he did gave her _such_ a heavy feeling in her heart.

Then of course she was consumed with a rage so _big_ and so _powerful_ that it became near impossible to keep under control. She wanted Ilan Bodnar's head on a stick and she was prepared to do whatever it took to achieve it. _Gone_ were the days of going out with drinks with the team. She threw herself into finding the man who had taken away the last biological family she had. And when she found him, when she accidentally (she said it was, but she was never quite sure because she wasn't exactly sad he was dead) killed him, she felt no relief, no sense of accomplishment, just a feeling of _nothingness_ and _hollowness_ that scared her. That night she struggled to sleep because her last act of loyalty to her father had made her everything she was trying not to be. That night she remembered what Ari had said to her about his irrational fear. She had asked him what he feared and when he had replied butterflies, she had scoffed and had asked why. Butterflies were such a stupid thing to be afraid of. And he had replied, _butterflies are free to do whatever they want, whenever they want. They are so free, Ziva. I do not know what I would do with a freedom like that._ But Ari was dead too, as was Tali and her mother and there was nobody to blame but herself.

And then there were the outcomes, the consequences and she did what she had done the last time everything had gotten too much, she ran away. Except she ran to somewhere familiar and it rather disgusted her. She had lost her ability to move anywhere at the drop of a hat. It was true that all roads lead home because all the paths and roads she took lead her to Israel or America and she could never be free of either. And then all of a sudden Tony appeared and begged her with those sea-green eyes to _please return home_ but she just _couldn't_ because her father and Ari had died there but her mother and Tali had died here and everything was just _so damn complicated_ that it made her want to vomit. She stuck to her guns and said no and then he left and she tried _so very hard_ not to break down and cry when he walked away but once he was in the plane she just couldn't take it because she was leaving an entire eight years behind. An eight years she never thought she would have and it made her _oh so sad_ but she had to move on, she just _had_ to because she couldn't be who she was. Not even if she wanted to.

It was time to begin again anyway.


End file.
